Ben Price, CAE, ICE-CCP, is an interim and transitional nonprofit executive with more than 25 years of leadership experience, including 16 as a chief executive. He steps into organizations facing a leadership change — planned or sudden — and works quickly to build trust with the board and staff, get an honest read on what’s happening, and ensure an organization is on solid footing before handing off to its next permanent leader.

That pattern is familiar to him. At the National Board of Surgical Technology and Surgical Assisting, he inherited a certification process bottlenecked by six-week manual processing times and modernized it top to bottom — cutting that to 24 hours, reducing operating costs by 40 percent and staffing needs by 35 percent, all while improving reliability. Over nine years he built reserves from scratch to 14 months of operating expenses plus a $1 million endowment and grew nationwide certification participation by more than 80 percent. None of that came from a static, easy environment – it came from realigning staff, board, and outside partners around a shared plan and holding the line on execution.

He later served as President and CEO of the National Board for Certification in Occupational Therapy, a $15 million organization with 50 staff and nearly 300,000 certificants, where he launched the organization’s first legislative and regulatory affairs strategy and moved core systems to secure cloud infrastructure. Earlier, as Executive Director of the Colorado Association of Health Plans, he led a small team – two staff plus ten contract lobbyists – through the disruption of the Affordable Care Act’s rollout, building consensus among competing insurers, providers, regulators, and consumer advocates while the ground was genuinely shifting under the organization.

Ben’s nonprofit governance experience extends beyond his own executive roles. He currently serves on the boards of Care Synergy and the Colorado Visiting Nurse Association — chairing each at different points — and The Denver Hospice and completed a five-year term as a Commissioner of the National Commission for Certifying Agencies. That board-side experience, sitting across the table from an executive during a leadership transition rather than being the executive, shapes how he approaches interim work: he knows what a board needs to hear from someone stepping in temporarily, and what it doesn’t.

Through Ben Price Consulting, he now advises nonprofit and association boards and executive teams on governance, strategy, and organizational readiness. As an interim leader, his approach is consistent: assess fast, communicate plainly about what he finds even when it’s uncomfortable, stabilize operations and staff morale, and build the conditions – clear priorities, a functioning team, a board that understands its role – or the organization’s next permanent leader to succeed from day one. He holds the Certified Association Executive (CAE) and ICE Certified Credentialing Professional (ICE-CCP) designations.

LinkedIn: Ben Price